[Phoenix32]

The whole hard disk question is one of concern to me as well, and I am sure others.

From all appearances, reading user reviews and so forth, here is where it looks like we stand...

WD decided to throw all of us wanting RAID solutions under the bus unless we were willing to pay a very serious premium for RAID Edition drives (and now RED also). They did this on purpose because it is nothing more than a timing issue in firmware that you used to be able to patch, but they stopped allowing it.

Maxtor always sucked with much higher failure rates, but now belongs to Seagate.

Seagate used to have okay drives, but ever since they bought out Maxtor, their failure rates have increased by leaps and bounds. The customer reviews have taken very deep spiral downwards.

Hitachi drives are rated by people as running much hotter. Anyone who has been in electronics very long knows that Heat = Higher Power being used which in turn means more cooling and noise, but even more importantly shorter life spans. This appears to be held true when reading many reviews of these drives.

That leaves Samsung, which -WAS- a good option. I have used them and they were great, but do not let the mass high ratings on places like newegg fool you. Dig deeper. You will find that Seagate quietly bought them out a while back. They are now Seagate drives with Samsung labels. If you look at only the more recent reviews of the drives, you will notice a very clear trend. They are getting the same reviews as the Seagate/Maxtor drives were/are. The high rating is based on a very large base of much earlier reviews when they were Samsung.

And just to pour heaping amount of salt and iodine to the wounds, the Tailand floods a year or so ago drove HD prices through the roof. Then of course, the HD manufacturers are milking it for all it's worth, even though they have been back to full production for some time now and prices are still nowhere near where they were before the floods.

All in all, IMO, the HD market sucks VERY BAD right now, has for a while, and does not appear to have any light at the end of the tunnel. I am VERY negative towards the hard drive market these days. It is all bad, to even worse... So bad, I have considered giving the Hitachi drives a try out of desperation as the least of evils.

I would welcome as many opinions as possible to this topic on current hard drives.